about the art

Tim Feeney (film and sound) and Naomi Nakazato (multimedia art) use landscape and natural materials to explore questions of memory and belonging. Their works turn to the terrains around us, asking how we situate ourselves within the histories we inhabit and inherit.

As a sound artist and composer, Tim explores environments as instruments, listening for what they carry of history, ancestry, and language. His sound film Contour Lines is part of a larger project in which he sonically investigated the eroded landscapes of Burren in County Clare, Ireland—both through physical study of the area’s properties and, as he describes, “an attempt as an Irish-American to reckon with language, archaeology, and colonial history felt as formative but inarticulable without lived context.” His film presents an eroded terrace on the side of Mullach Mór—a 600-foot limestone summit—with wind- and rain-soaked sonic interventions that engage the site’s acoustic, geologic, and archaeologic properties.

Across her practice, Naomi works with materials, landscapes, and memory to explore the complex in-between of her biracial experience. Naomi’s Void Study 2 prints a map-like landscape onto seaweed laver, a surface that resists ink and slowly decays. Maps promise accuracy and certainty, but here the fragility of the image points to the fallibility of collective memory and questions how we navigate histories, home, and the search for belonging. Through this layered ground, Naomi opens a space where absence, identity, and the possibility of return can be continually rewritten.

Experienced together, these works suggest a dialogue across time scales, seeking understanding and reckoning with heritage and belonging. Both invite us to consider how landscapes hold us, and how memory is carried as it both endures and slips away.

for a deeper dive

Tim’s film, Contour Lines, is one piece in a large project in which he sonically investigated the eroded “anti-monuments” of Burren in County Clare: stone farm walls and remnants of circular structures on hillsides; cairns near a shoreline; a field of glacial boulders interrupted by a road smashed from the surrounding stone formations, in forced public work by the starving during the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852. Explore and learn more about the project on Tim’s website.

“I am drawn to deceptively simple materials, physical and sonic: the sound of two stones scraped slowly across one another; the reverberant impact of these stones struck hard together in a resonant concrete building; the change that results if a person walks slowly around that building while striking the stones together; the memory of pulling these stones out of a river on a trip twelve years in the past. The act of finding these materials, their resonances, and their arrangement in time and space, makes them incredibly personal, and they become talismans marking specific times and places in my life.”

– Tim Feeney

Across her practice, Naomi works with materials, landscapes, and memory to explore the complex in-between of her biracial experience. We find that viewing her practice as a whole enriches how we see her work, revealing stunning patterns in her approach to materials and recurring details. We recommend starting with her most recent work, then making your way back to 2022, when she created Void Study 2.

“As a Japanese-American artist, my multidisciplinary, materials-based practice employs the plastic syntax of language and landscapes and their artificially relative perspectives to describe the fragmentary in-between of my biracial experience. My practice enacts a faulty kind of translation, particularly the mechanical transference of images and their matrices, to scrutinize notions of authenticity and interpolate lapses in fluency as an emblem of belonging.”

– Naomi Nakazato

Meet the Artists